This service takes an unaligned protein domain sequence and returns the most likely protein family from the ~18,000 families in Pfam-32.0.

A protein family is a group of proteins which share function and evolutionary origin. These similarities are reflected in their sequence similarity, i.e. their conservation in primary structure (amino acid sequence).

The project implements a slimmed down version of the ProtCNN model proposed by Bileschi et al. [1] using Flax [2]. The model was trained using the pfam-seed-random-split dataset, either available in raw form from Kaggle or in preprocessed format using:

FILENAME=pfam-seed-random-split.tar.gz
gsutil cp gs:https://protein-classification-service/$FILENAME data/ && \
    tar -xvf data/$FILENAME -C data/

The preprocessing scripts can be found on the dev branch of this repo (scripts/reformat-pfam-dataset.sh + raw_data_to_jax_arrays.py). The Python script pads and tokenizes the unaligned protein sequences and casts the string accession codes to class indexes. These arrays are then stored in .npy format for faster load times for training. The preprocessed data available through Google Cloud (see above) also comes with the relevant token and label maps.

The model performance on train, dev and test spits is shown below:

For details on model hyperparameters, please refer to protein_classification/constants.py on the dev branch of this repository.

Assuming helm is installed (plus a Kubernetes cluster being available), the service can be instantiated using:

helm install `basename $PWD` ./helm

This will start the Seldon microservice. You can now send post requests to the model to receive a classification, e.g.:

# port forward service
kubectl port-forward svc/`basename $PWD` ${PORT:=7687} &

curl -X POST localhost:${PORT}/api/v1.0/predictions \
     -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     -d '{"sequence": ["EIKKMISEIDKDGSGTIDFEEFLTMMTA"]}'

The request can be sent as a batch, where the JSON array of sequences would be passed through the model in one go. Keep this in mind when running on GPU, as the service does not manage memory for you - i.e. it does not do mini-batches. Hence, it can cause out-of-memory issues when sending too large requests.

A batched request:

curl -X POST localhost:${PORT}/api/v1.0/predictions \
     -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     -d '{"sequence": ["EIKKMISEIDKDGSGTIDFEEFLTMMTA", "IVQINEIFQVETDQFTQLLDA"]}'  # send 2 sequences for inference

To run the unit tests, create a local Python3.9 environment and run the following:

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
python3 -m pytest -v tests --cov=protein_classification

1. Bileschi, M.L., Belanger, D., Bryant, D.H., Sanderson, T., Carter, B., Sculley, D., Bateman, A., DePristo, M.A. and Colwell, L.J., 2022. Using deep learning to annotate the protein universe. Nature Biotechnology, pp.1-6.
2. Heek, J., Levskaya, A., Oliver, A., Ritter, M., Rondepierre, B., Steiner, A. and van Zee, M., Flax: A neural network library and ecosystem for JAX, 2020. URL http:https://github.com/google/flax, 1.